Debraj Ray

Debraj Ray (born 3 September 1957) is an Indian-American economist, who is currently teaching and working at New York University. His research interests focus on development economics and game theory. Ray served as Co-editor of the American Economic Review between 2012 and 2020.

Ray is Julius Silver Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, New York University, since 2003, and Professor of Economics at New York University since 1999. He is also a Part-Time Professor at the University of Warwick. He is a Research Affiliate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a council member of the Game Theory Society, and a board member of Theoretical Research in Development Economics (ThReD). He served as a board member at the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), since its inception till 2023.

Education Debraj Ray graduated from the University of Calcutta, where he earned a B.A. in economics in 1977. After that, Ray obtained a M.A. (1981) and a Ph.D. (1983) both from Cornell University, where his doctoral supervisor was Mukul Majumdar. The title of his dissertation is Essays in Intertemporal Economics.

Academic career Prior to joining NYU, Ray held academic positions at Stanford University, the Indian Statistical Institute, and at Boston University, where he was Director of the Institute for Economic Development. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, MIT, the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the People's University of China in Beijing, the London School of Economics, Columbia University, the Instituto de Análisis Económico in Barcelona and the University of Oslo.

Notable contributions by Ray include:

a concept of egalitarianism under participation constraints (Dutta and Ray 1989); a theory of renegotiation in dynamic games (Bernheim and Ray 1989, Ray 1994); a theory of poverty traps based on undernutrition, and later related work on persistent inequality (Dasgupta and Ray 1986, Dasgupta and Ray 1987, Baland and Ray 1991, Mookherjee and Ray 2003); the development of a concept of polarization, and its connections to social conflict (Esteban and Ray 1994, Duclos, Esteban and Ray 2004, Esteban and Ray 2011); a theory of coalition formation (Ray and Vohra 1997, Ray and Vohra 1999, Ray 2008); a theory of socially determined aspirations (Ray 2006, Genicot and Ray 2017); a leading textbook in Development Economics (Ray 1998).

Professional affiliations and awards Ray is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, and a recipient of the Outstanding Young Scientists Award in mathematics from the Indian National Science Academy. He was awarded a Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa from the University of Oslo in 2011.

Apart from three terms as Co-editor of the American Economic Review, Ray has served on the editorial board of Econometrica, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, the Japanese Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, American Economic Journal Microeconomics. He has served as a Foreign Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, and as Co-editor of the Econometric Society journal, Theoretical Economics.

Among Ray's many public lectures are the 2013 Sir Richard Stone Annual Lecture at the University of Cambridge, the 2016 Laffont Lecture of the Econometric Society (Geneva), the 2017 Richard Ely Distinguished Lectures at Johns Hopkins University, the 2022 Haavelmo Lecture at the University of Oslo, and the inaugural Ashok Kotwal Memorial Lecture (Ideas for India, New Delhi, 2022).

Ray has received many awards for his teaching and research from different institutions around the world. Among them are: Mahalanobis Memorial Medal of the Indian Econometric Society, 1989 Fellow of the Econometric Society, 1993 Gittner Teaching Award from Boston University, 1996 Guggenheim Fellow, 1997 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University, 1985 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2016 Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa from University of Oslo, 2011 Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, 2011 Golden Dozen Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching from New York University, 2017